Day 39: Alka-Seltzer Cold Tablets

We'd only been together a few months when I got sick. It was a beautiful summer afternoon and I was sitting in a lawn chair in my backyard so I could spit on the pavement since my throat hurt too much to swallow. I always seemed to get sick on weekends and never wanted to go to the emergency room or prompt care because it took forever to receive a prescription that would make me better just as fast as any over-the-counter medication. I had graduated from high school a few months prior and been rejected to most of the colleges I'd applied to, so I had no idea where my life was headed. My boyfriend had one more year left of high school before he graduated and moved on to the army. We spent a lot of time together that summer, sitting on the stone steps of an abandoned church not far from my house. My mother insisted I stay at home that day though, so he came to me.

He walked the half-mile from his house to mine in under ten minutes. He wore cargo pants and before he left home he'd searched through his bedroom and filled his pockets with things to bring me. I waited for him on the front steps so we could share a kiss without my parents standing over my shoulder. As he came striding down the sidewalk I could hear the familiar sound of his keys jingling as they slapped against his thigh with each forward step. We hugged and he started unloading his pockets. He pulled out about five books, several VHS tapes, boxes of cold medicine, a Gameboy, and a few games. Among the items were the large blue Alka-Seltzer tablets pictured above.  I tried to balance everything in my overflowing hands as we walked into the backyard. I wasn't used to having someone shower me with gifts or nice gestures and nearly started crying at his kindness.

While I was waiting out front, my mother had set up a second lawn chair beside mine and hosed down the pavement so he wouldn't have to see the puddle of spit I'd left behind. Had she met him before she would have known that he wouldn't have cared in the least and probably would have added his own saliva to the pile. My parents had gone inside and were probably watching us through the cracks in the blinds. They came out a few minutes later. My boyfriend immediately jumped up to shake my father's hand. He said something cheesy and charming like, "I want to shake the hand of the man who made this wonderful girl." My father was instantly impressed and would retell the story of the first time they met for years after. I've always liked shaking people's hands because I secretly draw conclusions about their personality based on the firmness (or weakness) of their grip. My father, who had worked with his hands most of his life and kept himself in good shape before his back breaking fall, must have been impressed by my boyfriend's bone-crushing handshake. It certainly wasn't his long hair, ripped flannel, and sailor-mouth that won him over.

I used some of the pills he had brought over and they did make me feel better. I kept the others in my desk drawer for the next time I got sick. I was constantly getting sick due to poor eating and sleeping habits, but I never used the last six pills. Even though they expired in 2004, I held onto them for sentimental value. He'd won me over that day too.

While he was deployed to Iraq, I asked my brother, a carpenter, to build me a box to store all of the letters he sent me from the war zone. My brother hand crafted a wooden box with a glass enclosure on the top. I created a pattern for a Celtic love knot and hand embroidered a design for the opening. The box was nothing as I'd imagined it would be, but my brother had made it and so I learned to love it. I can hold all of the letters he sent to me in the four years he was stationed half-way around the world in one hand. I added other mementos to the box also, including the six alka-seltzer tablets that I was still saving for no purpose other than to bring back memories.

In high school, my boyfriend and I wore matching necklaces.  They were large metal balls on a chain that were popular among the goths and kids who listened to metal music.  He gave me his before he deployed and I kept both in the wooden box my brother made. Last year, just before he moved out, he went through the box and removed his necklace. I don't know how he knew where to find it or why he would have cared to take back something he hadn't worn in close to ten years. When I asked him about it he said, "It's mine. I don't know why you care."  I was more upset that he'd gone through my personal things, things that held so much emotional weight, that he had given to me at one point in life. I'm not quite ready to discard his letters and don't know if I'll ever be, but I'm glad that I can begin removing some of the other objects from this box. 

Day 38: Sled

When I was very young, before my father broke his back, my family liked to take car trips to New Hampshire or Cape Cod. We never took a map and it was in the days before GPS systems or cell phones, so, inevitably, we got lost. My brother told me a story that I don't recall of how we once drove four hours, never finding our final destination, and only stopped at a McDonalds before turning around to drive four hours back home.

I remember once we loaded our blue plastic sleds in the car and went driving north in search of hills. Usually, when my father was at work and school was cancelled, my mother would bring us to Swan Street Park-- a five minute walk from our house. It must have been a weekend day when we piled into the car. After hours of driving, we found a hill and pulled to the side of the road. It was freezing, the wind stung my face and I remember standing at the top and not wanting to go down. My father sat in the sled behind me and pushed us down the hill, I was afraid of going fast, so he put his foot out to slow us down and inadvertently kicked up the snow with his work boot. The snow flew up and directly into my face the whole way down. As soon as we made it to the top of the hill I buried my face in my mother's stomach crying hot tears down my stinging cheeks. My father felt terrible and pulled out his "hanky" to wipe down my soaked face. The snow had gone up his pants on the ride down. We were both soaked and freezing. I don't remember if we stayed after that single trip down the hill, but I remember the wet, cold car ride home seemed to take forever. It might have been the last time I ever went sledding.

Years later, my husband called me excitedly around Christmas time to ask if he could buy us sleds. He didn't get excited about much, so of course I said yes. That winter we got more snow than I ever remember seeing in my life. Another foot seemed to fall every three to five days. The piles in the lawn beside my driveway towered over my head and I had to catapult the snow up and over the bank. We thought of the sleds. He said he wanted to go to a place in Billerica-- several cities and a highway away. He had gone to a place there, maybe a church parking lot, when he was in middle school. He couldn't remember exactly where it was, or what it was called. The only other time we'd gone to Billerica together was on a beautiful summer day and we'd gotten lost.  I wasn't about to take my car out in a blizzard to go searching for a place that probably only existed in memory.

The snow continued to fall that winter and snow days from work racked up. One weekday, when we were both off, we went to go dig out his mother's car. We decided to stop home to eat and then try to finally take the sleds out. I pulled into the driveway and got out, holding the car door to steady myself on the slippery pavement. As I was shutting the door, my husband snuck up behind me and made a noise to startle me. It was enough to jolt me into momentary hesitation. My entire body froze for just an instant, but it was long enough for the car door to swing shut.  My index finger was still in the door, but I pulled away instinctively. I remember my eyes filled up with tears before I felt the pain or realized what had happened. I swore at my husband, told him he'd made me shut my finger in the door, and walked toward the house, cupping my hand. "Are you alright?" he asked. "Don't you see the blood trail in the snow?" I answered.

Once when I was in Georgia, the doctor told me I needed to have a tetanus shot.  The nurse pulled out a small bottle and asked me if I could read the series of letters and numbers on the label to her. "Yup, that's the one," she said after I'd read them off. Growing up I had to have blood drawn at least every six months, if not more often. As a child I would cry, kick, scream, and fight to avoid the pin prick. My father would have to take the day off from work so that he could physically restrain me, locking my legs in his, strapping my arm down to the table with his massive hands. When I was seven and hospitalized I had to have daily blood tests in a addition to a permanent IV in my right arm. I was in too much pain and too weak to fight. With practice, you can grow accustomed to anything. After two weeks in the hospital, having bi-yearly blood tests seemed insignificant. From then on I would roll up my sleeve and sit stoically in the chair, smiling as every nurse commented on what prominent veins I had.  A few years before the tetanus shot in Georgia I had contracted blood poisoning and gone an entire day without having it treated. My foot ballooned up four times its size and a red line had formed up my shin. The doctors immediately stabbed me with a tetanus shot directly in the bony top of my foot. The shot to the arm in Georgia was nothing compared to the needle to the foot, so I sat unfazed.

Just after the nurse removed the needle from my arm, she said I would have to wait a few minutes to make sure I wasn't having an allergic reaction. She said to tell her if I felt dizzy, nauseous, or anything out of the ordinary. "I feel dizzy right now," I said, wondering why I was suddenly breathing heavy and losing my vision. "It wouldn't happen that fast. You're fine," she said. "Something's wrong," I managed to slur. She put a blood pressure cuff on my arm and seconds later said, "You wasn't lyin'." She had me sit with my head between my legs and instructed my husband to get a wet paper towel from the bathroom. The feeling passed after a few minutes. She explained that nearly passing out was called vasovagal, a natural reaction to trauma (even minor) that you could develop at any point in life. She laughed as she described my husband's face and urgency. "I thought he was going to have a heart attack," she chuckled. Later, he told me he thought she'd given me the wrong vial and was prepared to raise hell if something serious happened.

After spending most of my life watching surgeries on TV, watching my mother treat my brother's injuries, and being stuck with needles at each visit to the doctor, in my twenties I began to experience vasovagal every time I had blood drawn. After some observation, I learned that it was usually brought on by lack of trust and if I felt comfortable with the person who was administering the test I could over come the feeling. It was a small victory when a few weeks ago I had a breast biopsy, fully awake, without any medication, and didn't feel like passing out. 

After shutting my finger in the car door, I stumbled into the house and grabbed a wad of paper towels and an ice cube to stop the bleeding. I felt the heart-pounding dizziness coming on and sprawled across my bed to avoid passing out. After a few moments of steadying my breath and regaining control I unwrapped the towels and found that I had a deep gash on the tip of my index finger. I think at that point my husband thought I'd lost a finger, and he was relieved to see me still in one piece. I'm anemic so even a paper cut takes days to heal. It took hours of holding wrapped ice cubes around my finger to slow the bleeding. My husband pulled out his army field dressing kit and wrapped my finger in inches of gauze and tape.

We went to work the following day since the snow had melted enough to make the roads passable. I was afraid to take off the gauze in case I had another attack of vasovagal so I went to work looking like a  cartoon character who had just smashed her thumb on a hammer. My students and coworkers laughed at the ridiculous dressing and imagined the injury to be much worse than it was.

Even though it snowed several more times that year, we never took the sleds out. That was the last winter we made any attempt to do fun things together, so the sleds stayed under our bed, collecting dust. My index finger has a small white scar that I find myself tracing with my thumb at times.  For a while I was ashamed of the many marks I have on my body. I wrote a quote down from the book that I was reading when my husband told me he was leaving. I remind myself of it when I think of the emotional and physical scars that I bear: "A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means I survived" (From Little Bee by Chris Cleave). 

Day 37: Picture Frames

Before she passed away, my grandmother kept a table by the north-facing window in her second floor apartment. She lined the table with family photographs and crouched over it in her old wooden chair with a flower embossed red plastic backing.  She held her rosary beads in her soft, white, wrinkled hands, praying for all of us. She was deeply religious her entire life and as she sat in her hospital bed she said she could see Mother Mary, come to lead her to heaven. My father bent down and searched beyond the window, but couldn't see the visions that were so clear to her. She died twice in the hospital. My mother received a phone call from the doctor to say she'd passed. Ten minutes later we got a second call saying she was alive and fully coherent. She hadn't had a chance to say goodbye to her grandchildren, she said, so she'd returned. We went up to the hospital that night. I waited in the antiseptic hallway, afraid to go in and say goodbye. Eventually, I went into the room. She was pale and and worn, but content, at ease. She passed away a few days later and this time we buried her by her husband who had gone to an early grave 40 years prior.

My parents have a few framed pictures hanging in their living room. Above the fireplace, a photograph of them in their wedding wear, but, strangely, not from their wedding day. The picture is so faded the white of my mother's plain dress blends with her skin and my father's pale blue suit. Her dark curly hair and glasses are all that stand out. To the left, a photograph of my brother and me from when I was an infant and he was four. He's holding me in his lap, both of us are looking at the camera and smiling wide. To the right, a family photograph taken at the same time as the picture of my brother and I. It's the mid-eighties, but my parents are still dressed as if it's the 70s. My father has more hair and longer sideburns, he looks younger, happier. My mother is wearing a form-fitting dress, her hair cropped short on the sides and fuller on top. My brother is helping to hold me as I shine a toothless grin from my mother's lap.  Our yearbook photos hang on another wall on either side of a window. Neither of us looks much different than we did then. On another wall, a photograph of me from a dance recital wearing too much make-up and a long black ballet costume. A final picture of my husband and I at our wedding hangs on the third wall. We look young, naive.

While my husband was in Germany and Iraq, I kept framed pictures of him on my bureau. In the green wooden frame with the shamrock pattern I kept a photograph of him sitting in my passenger seat. We spent most of the first year of our relationship in my car, sitting for hours and talking or listening to music. He was wearing a green shirt, Fighting Irish baseball hat, and a sly smile. He'd lose the cushioning in his cheeks a few months later in basic training. In the second frame pictured above, I kept a picture that I took of us, also in my car, when he was home for leave on his nineteenth birthday. I bought a new dress for the occasion and he wore his Class As to a restaurant where we were ridiculously out of place. We pressed our foreheads together to take the picture. When you only see someone two or four weeks a year it's hard not to be in a state of bliss when you're together.

When he got out of the army I framed several pictures of him and his friends from Iraq. They lined our mantle above our non-functioning fireplace. When he left, he took the pictures out and left the frames exactly where they'd been. I found pictures for a few of them, but the two frames pictured above remind me too much of him.

Maybe someday I'll muster up the nerve to ask my parents if they plan to take my wedding picture down or if they think it will fade forever on the wall until even our smiles have disappeared into the bright white wear of light.

Day 36: Cookie Cutters

Baking Christmas cookies has been the only holiday tradition that I have gladly taken part in each year from the time I was old enough to mix the batter with my mother's wooden spoon.  We made pizzelles, cinnamon twirls, anise balls, chocolate chip (with and without chocolate, with and without nuts), sugar cookies, and in my teens I began making my signature gingerbread cookies that have become a staple at every holiday. My mother's pans were blackened with age, long thin sheets that we placed in the oven two at a time. I have memories of standing up on a step stool over the single yellow kitchen counter, stirring away at endless bowls of batter. My mother always complained that I was scooping out too much for each cookie. I'd leave plenty of batter in the white plastic bowl and run my fingers around to lick the stickiness until my stomach hurt. The whole house would smell of sugar and spice. My father would sneak the cookies as they cooled on wire racks spread across the kitchen table. We'd pack them in Danish butter cookie tins from the 70s.

The year my then-boyfriend was stationed in Germany, I baked close to 300 cookies to box up and ship to him and his unit. My parents tried to discourage my efforts. "What are you doing that for?" my mother snapped. My father was too eager to take them to the post office for me. I walked them there myself, wanting to be sure they were sent with the correct postage and that they would arrive in time for Christmas. Several weeks later he came home on leave, a surprise that everyone else knew about. He proposed to me that New Year's, just weeks before he deployed to Iraq. I danced in the snow beneath the street lights that night on a quiet road by his best-friend's house.

He would spend the following Christmas in Iraq and I sent hundreds of cookies again. They took months to arrive, but I had vacuum sealed them in plastic wrapping and cushioned them between layers of plastic bubbles. The heat kept them soft, he said.

I still enjoy baking cookies at Christmas, although I don't make as many and I give most away to friends and co-workers. I bought the cookie cutter presses pictured above when I first moved back to Massachusetts. They seemed much larger, much more functional in the magazine catalog I ordered them from. I already had a set of cookie cutters for the sugar cookie recipe I'd perfected over the years, so this purchase was senseless. I think I might have tried to use them once, and the batter stuck to them despite how much flour I patted on.

For the first 24 days of the challenge, I followed Marylee's suggestion to make a list of the things I wanted to buy and to set it aside until day 25. I decided not to write a list, but to just keep one in my memory. I only had a few things I planned to purchase, but by day 25 I decided I didn't need them after all. Letting go of so much has changed the way I shop and think about shopping. Before, I never brought lists-- not even to the supermarket. There's this strange phenomena that happens as soon as I cross the automatic door threshold and step into the sensory over-load of any store-- I completely forget what I have come for. Before, I would wander around for hours, trying to recall the single item that prompted the trip. In my meandering, I would inevitably find more things to buy and sometimes forget the first thing completely, which prompted a second trip to the store and more needless purchasing. Today, I stopped by a store on my way home from work with the intention of buying a lamp for my new meditation room and a blue cardigan to match my blue summer skirts. I came out with both items and nothing else. It's refreshing to have regained control over my apartment, my past, and my buying.

Day 35: Scrapbook

While my then-boyfriend was away at basic training I purchased this scrapbook from a local craft store. Green leather emblazoned with the army's official seal, I decided I would chronicle his time in the military and give it to him as a gift when his eight year contract had expired. There was one small problem, however. With him half-way around the world for the first four years, I had no way of getting the pictures and mementos that I'd planned to include. Still, I held onto it figuring when we moved in together eventually I'd discreetly dig through his things to find what I needed.

I would end up going through his things three months after we'd gotten married and moved in together, but for a different reason. One Sunday morning I woke before him and crept into the kitchen to make him bacon and eggs. He'd been awake long after I'd gone to sleep. I noticed a few beer bottles on the mini stand I'd purchased for his laptop. The raised screen was the first indication that something was different since he always shut it when he was finished. I went over to close it and saw that he'd left an instant message conversation on the screen. The last thing he'd said to "Hollywood Girl" was "love ya." At the sight of the words my heart started pounding. "It's probably just one of his sisters," I reasoned with myself. He was constantly discovering another sibling of his, offspring of his father who was known for sleeping around before he'd been put in prison. I scrolled to the beginning of the conversation and began reading. There was no rationalizing anymore, it was clear he was having an affair.

He was the only person I'd ever trusted. In the four years we'd maintained a long-distance relationship I never suspected him of cheating. He would feed me stories of his faithfulness, saying he was the only one of his friends who didn't sleep around as their girlfriends waited back home. When he disappeared one weekend and called me on Monday to say he'd been to Amsterdam I was hurt, but believed him when he said he had remained faithful while his friends went off to strip clubs and brothels. In the time he was gone, I hardly even talked to other men, determined not to be like "all the other" military wives who couldn't handle the time apart and looked for comfort in someone else.

I remember that morning like a dream, as if I am floating outside of my body, looking down on everything that followed the realization that he had broken my trust. I pulled myself up from the living room floor, my legs felt as if they were made of lead. It was like in reoccurring nightmares when I desperately needed to run, but my feet were frozen to floor. I stumbled down the hallway and into the bedroom. He woke up as soon as I approached the bed and knew something was wrong. I literally collapsed in tears on the ground. He followed me, asking "What's wrong." "Who were you talking to last night," I asked. He lied. "You want to fuck her," I said screaming and clawing at the rug beneath me. "I waited for you," I said again and again. In shock, he couldn't put the pieces together. "What are you talking about?" he asked. I told him he'd left his conversation up on the computer and I'd read it. He begged me to calm down. "Stop screaming," he said, "someone's going to call the MPs."

In an attempt to calm me down he told me the truth about who she was. He'd met her in seventh grade, he said. She moved away, but they had kept in contact. It had never been a physical relationship he claimed. I asked why he would do it, "Because I could," he said.

I had moved miles away from my family, my friends, my job, left everything behind to be with him. I was reasonably devastated to find out that he had lied to me for years. "I only started talking to her again recently," he said. He told me they would talk while I was making him dinner as if that was going to make me feel better.

I spent the entire day in bed crying. The annual book sale that I had been looking forward to for weeks was the following day and I no longer cared to go. He begged me to go, to snap out of my funk, to "be happy." We went, but I wasn't happy. I could barely meet his gaze over the rows of books.

When he went to work the following morning I came home determined to find her on myspace-- it was back before facebook was popular. I found her immediately. Her profile was filled with pictures of her in scantily clad outfits with drinks in her hands or her infant son who was named after my husband. I sent her a threatening message. She wrote back immediately. We went back and forth for an hour. Although she said the child was not his I never believed her. They looked too much alike, they had the same name. I hated myself for empathizing with her, for seeing her as a person and not a monster after our conversation and I hated myself for staying with my remorseless husband. Maybe if I wasn't living so far from home, or if he weren't in the military, or if I had had more self-respect it would have been easier to walk away. When one of my closest friends called me the day after the myspace conversation I couldn't even bring myself to tell her.  I lied and said things were going really well.

I went digging through the box closest to the door in his spare room. I found letters from family and friends, but none from her. I stopped looking because, really, if she had sent him letters I didn't want to see them.

I hadn't been able to find a job in the three months since we'd moved to Georgia so I had the entire day to sit at home and sulk. Sitting at the kitchen table one afternoon I saw a school bus dropping children off outside and decided I was going to go back to school to become an English teacher. I had little desire to teach, but needed to find a way to support myself.

We stayed together five years after I found out about that first affair. I tried to regain trust in him, but he continued to break it over the years. I blamed myself for not being able to forgive and let go. For somehow not being a good enough wife to lead him to do the things he did.

When we moved in together in Massachusetts I showed him the photo album I'd bought almost eight years before and never even taken out of the plastic and cardboard. He pulled out a pile of pictures for me to add in, but I had lost the desire to scrapbook about something we both wanted to forget. He celebrated the end of his eight year contract alone last summer after he moved out. There's no need for me to hold onto this gift that will never be given.

Day 34: Children's Beach Chair

In September I began a  yoga teacher training program at a local studio. The first night we were warned that some days we'd be sitting for hours and were welcome to bring a chair or cushion. The following day just about everyone in the group had a stylish beach chair while I propped myself up on a blue yoga block. I scanned my memory for something I could bring the next day that might be lying low around my house. I had a lawn chair, but that would seem too tall and out of place. I could bring my meditation cushion, but that wouldn't provide me with back support. I decided to take a trip to the Christmas Tree Shop certain they would have something.

There was an entire display of beach chairs still left over from summer on sale for $8. They came in a neat drawstring bag that resembled a yoga mat bag. I unfastened one to set up beside the display and discovered the chairs were meant for children. Still, I sat in it, drawing sideways looks from other shoppers. The arms went out far enough to accommodate my hips that had widened at some point in my early twenties in preparation for childbirth. I decided the chair was perfect and purchased it.

The next day I squeezed myself in for several hours. It didn't take long for the metal bars beneath the fabric to begin cutting into my thighs. Still I sat, determined to make the chair work. "At least it has a hole for my water bottle," I thought until I realized the base of my bottle was too big for the mesh opening. With my father's stubbornness, I sat in it the remainder of the day. Training was one weekend a month so it stayed in my trunk in the drawstring bag beside my yoga mat for four weeks. The following weekend I didn't bother to take it out. I brought my meditation cushion instead, which was hours more accommodating than the too-small chair and the studio wall provided all the back support I needed.

Although I had no intentions of ever using the chair again, it remained in my trunk until just recently. I open my trunk daily to reach for my yoga mat and couldn't help but be reminded of this illogical purchase each time. Thankfully 24(+) things allowed me to finally take it out. I brought it to my three-year old niece and propped it up on the giant deck that my brother and I built alone in nine days one summer when we were both unemployed. We dug holes for the foundation, poured cement, carted thousands of pounds of wood, and pounded in nails the hottest week of the year when the temperatures reached close to 100 and shade didn't reach the workspace until late afternoon. It was one of the single most rewarding experiences of my life and makes barbeques on his deck all the more enjoyable. My niece made several jumbled expressions of surprise and wonder at the new chair. After admiring it from a safe distance and with some encouragement from my brother and I she sat down, her feet reaching the floor perfectly. "Thank you Auntie," she said and jumped up to wrap her arms around me.

Years ago, my sister-in-law's grandfather built a cottage on a private beach somewhere near Cape Cod. The family shares the cottage, each claiming their own week of the summer to sit and relax and watch the waves. I know this chair will go with them to the beach this year and my niece will sit in it, swinging her feet back and fourth in the sand by the ocean.

Day 33: Remote Control Car

It's funny how many of my mother-in-law's misguided gifts are still sitting around my home. Getting rid of gifts is always especially hard because of the guilt attached to removing something that was meant especially for you. The whole custom of gift-giving in America dictates that you must feign happiness or excitement even when the gift is not something you would have wanted. Holidays are always a source of stress for me, and I'm sure for others too. I think about what to buy for others weeks before the holiday.  Getting older makes gift giving all the more complicated. I could easily buy what I want, but really, there is nothing I need. If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm in the business of letting go, not acquiring.

The remote control car pictured above was given to my husband for Christmas one year. My mother-in-law gave matching cars to him and his brother so they could race them around the house. A great idea for children under ten, but for adults in their twenties and thirties the idea was laughable. They both just gave each other looks at the suggestion and placed the cars beside the piles of clothes and house-hold items they'd already unwrapped. Unfazed, my mother-in-law touted how they were indestructible and could crash into anything.  She nearly begged them to open the boxes and begin the races.

The car traveled home with us, never opened, and found a place on top of one of the cabinets that came with our apartment. It remained there until the yard sale I had a few weeks ago. An overprotective grandmother dragging two young children, a boy and a girl, inspected it for much too long before saying she'd buy it. "I need to talk to their mother first," she said and disappeared again.  She returned a short while later.  She asked the little boy if he'd use it. He didn't speak, but just looked as wide-eyed and scared as his sister who was clutching the bunched up fabric of her dress, looking close to tears. "It doesn't say what age on it," she said. I decided not to point out the giant 3+ on the front in case the boy was 2 1/2. "I'm sure he won't hurt himself with it," I reasoned. "It's indestructible," I said, intoning my mother-in-law, laughing silently to myself at a joke she didn't understand. She gave me three dollars for it, even though I'd asked for five, but I was so grateful to let it go I would have given it away for free. "Let grandma hold it," she said tucking it under her arm so she could take the tiny hand of each child in her own. "Let's go get you your carriage," she said to the girl, leading the way up the small hill beside my driveway.